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*Migration Histories > Irish > Culture and Festivals
* The Pub 
 
It was in the pub, they drank their sub God damn and blast the beer.
Traditional Song.

I still sit in a pub on a Saturday night and drift back with the rest of them to quieter days when we knew who we were and there was order and meaning in our lives. I think of the old Dublin humour and chat and the interest and respect for your neighbour. I recall the Irish countryside of people comfortable with themselves and the earth who were not destroying all around them but a living part of an integrated whole. In the darker hours these memories can lighten the mood and bring solace.
Liam Purcell (Stories Gallery)

Guinness has become, in the eyes of many, the national drink of Ireland. First brewed in Dublin in 1759, it was originally known as 'Guinness's black Protestant porter', after the owner's opposition to the United Irishmen. It is significant that consumption of it in London was so great that it was decided to establish a brewery there in 1936.

Liam Purcell's first job was working for the Guinness brewery in Dublin.

You had to bring the beer down from the vat house by opening various cocks and guide each beer to the point where it would be racked or filled into the casks. There were the hogsheads, the barrels, the kilderkins, the firkins and the smallest, the pins. They were mainly wooden casks but the metal ones were beginning to arrive and the racking shed was a madhouse of banging shouting and shunting. Whenever a female entered this male emporium all the rackers would bang the barrels with their mallets until she had crossed the shed out of sight. The din was horrific and would intimidate any woman who dared to enter what the men considered masculine territory. One early morning a fellow worker Michael O'Kelly was letting the beer flow down by banging open the cock when it stuck and I can still see him whacking away as the Guinness poured over and saturated him. Talk about having your fill of Guinness. There were four different types of beer; Irish draught and bottling, export and porter that was a bit weaker but pretty strong at that time.
Liam Purcell (Community Gallery)

Whilst living in London, Liam sometimes found temporary employment as a barman:

I went to a pub called the St James Tavern beside Piccadilly Circus and bluffed my way into a job by saying my uncle had a pub in Tipperary and I was always helping out behind the bar. There was a lovely old barman called Joe working there and he was a dapper little dandy who glided on dancing feet around the bar and showed me all the ropes. He said if ever I fancied a bottle of Guinness to say thank you to a customer and just open a bottle and say cheers not worrying whether he had offered a drink or not. The landlady of the pub sat up on her high stool and watched us all, trying to catch us fiddling or slacking off in her fancy bar. She was a right old harridan with her hair tied back in a bun and a smile never crossed her face apart from a grovelling grimace to big spending customers.
Liam Purcell (Community Gallery)

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A group of Irish regulars at the White Swan in Wapping High Street gather at the pub for an outing. C. 1950.
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A group of Irish regulars at the White Swan in Wapping High Street gather at the pub for an outing. C. 1950.
* Moving Here catalogue reference (MOL) DK2838NG
According to Kevin O'Connor in The Irish in Britain, the pub had a 'traditional sacred place...in native Irish society...In the rural towns and villages from which most immigrants came, the pub is the natural business and social centre, the latter day equivalent of the Roman Forum, wherein the day to day business of the community is transacted. On a par with the priest, the publican is the most influential figure, and the repository of as many secrets'.

So for many an Irish migrant, the pub became an important social centre where information could be obtained, jobs and people located, bets placed and sorrows drowned. When John O'Neill arrived in London in 1808 looking for his father, he was directed first to St Giles, where the Irish 'all hang together like a swarm of bees' and then to The Horse and Groom pub.

There could also be a negative side to the Irish pub culture. For the Irish immigrant it could be at times an antidote to loneliness and a refuge from the boarding house. For some the result was alcohol dependence, but this has produced a negative stereotype: the innate Irish predisposition to alcoholism. Perhaps, as with criminality with which it was associated, this is confusing cause and symptom. There is nothing exclusively Irish in drunkenness leading to violence. But for many the pub was a social event. The 1836 Report on the Irish Poor in Britain noted that Irish immigrants 'often drink with their wives and children, not only in their own houses, but even take their entire families to the tavern'.

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'Its boom time for Irish theme pubs'
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'Its boom time for Irish theme pubs' Irish Echo, November 1994
* Moving Here catalogue reference (BL) 025IESP199411
However, some 19th century parochial clubs and friendly societies required total abstinence of their members. In the middle of the century the Irish priest, Father Mathew, led a temperance campaign in both Britain and Ireland. In London, the campaign was revived in the 1870s by Father Lockhart, who claimed that nine-tenths of crimes committed by Irish people could be attributed to the 'demon of drink'. Father Nugent led similar campaigns in Liverpool.

Pubs were also important centres for Irish music. In London's Camden Town and Kentish Town in the 1950s, Irish music was played in pubs such as The Black Cap, The Mornington Arms, The Laurel Tree and The Eagleand in the 1960s, The White Hart in Fulham.

Such venues were not advertised so have left no record beyond personal memories and the occasional recording, such as Topic Record's Paddy in the Smoke A more recent development has been the emergence of the Irish 'theme' pub, reflecting the fact that it is currently fashionable to be Irish.

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Creators: Aidan Lawes

 
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